ST.
PETERSBURG, RUSSIA -- (Marketwired) -- 10/14/14 -- A General Atomics physicist
has won one of the most prestigious awards in fusion energy research, it was
announced this week at a major international scientific conference in Russia. Dr. Philip
Snyder, who works in General Atomics' San Diego headquarters, received the 2014
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Nuclear Fusion Prize. The award was
announced at the biennial conference during the opening ceremony of the 25th
IAEA Fusion Energy Conference being held Oct. 13-18 in St. Petersburg. Dr. Snyder won
the prize for his published scientific paper judged to provide the most impact
in nuclear fusion over the last two years. Dr. Snyder has spent the last 15
years working in fusion research at General Atomics (GA), where he serves as
Director of Theory and Computational Science for the Energy and Advanced
Concepts Group.
(Caption info):
Physicist wins international prize for leading fusion research: Philip Snyder
of General Atomics, center, with Mitsuru Kikuchi (left) Chairman of the
journal's Board of Editors awarding the prize being given by . Alexander
Bychkov, (right) Deputy Director General for Nuclear Energy,IAEA (International
Atomic Energy Agency) He is part of
an international effort by fusion scientists to harness the power of the Sun to
create a clean and virtually unlimited energy supply on Earth. Under the U.S.
Department of Energy, GA runs the largest U.S. magnetic fusion energy program. This award
recognized a scientific paper Dr. Snyder wrote and published in the journal
Nuclear Fusion. (All of the more than 350 papers considered for the award were
published in 2011.) His prize-winning paper was entitled, "A first-principles predictive
model of the pedestal height and width: development, testing and ITER
optimization with the EPED model," P.B. Snyder, R.J. Groebner,
J.W. Hughes, T.H. Osborne, M. Beurskens, A.W. Leonard, H.R. Wilson and X.Q. Xu
2011 Nucl. Fusion 51 103016. His research
has led to a more accurate way to predict the generation of energy-making
plasma in a tokamak, a fusion machine. Pedestal height is expected to have a
dramatic impact on overall fusion performance in future fusion devices such as
ITER, the massive fusion machine now being built in France by a consortium of
35 nations including the U.S. In announcing
the prize, IAEA officials said, "This outstanding paper presents a
compelling model to predict pedestal parameters, and provides validation
through experimental observations across a number of machines. The work has the
potential to significantly focus the predictions of performance in future
devices." Since 2006,
the IAEA has celebrated excellence in its journal, Nuclear Fusion, with its
annual prize. The award is based on papers considered to have made the greatest
impact in the fusion community in the two years following publication. The
selection is made by the journal's Board of Editors by confidential balloting.
This is the third such prize won by a GA scientist, out of the nine prizes
awarded in the world to date. This year's
award was presented Oct. 13 at the opening ceremony of the 25th Fusion Energy
Conference by IAEA Deputy Director General Alexander Bychkov. Dr. Snyder
earned his Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences (plasma physics) from Princeton
University, supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship, and his
undergraduate degree in computational physics at Yale University. A key element
of the research described in the award-winning paper, said Dr. Snyder, is the
strong collaboration between theoretical and experimental physicists, both
between the GA theory group and the on-site DIII-D experiment as well as
collaboration with researchers around the world, including at the MIT Alcator
C-Mod experiment and Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the JET tokamak and
York Plasma Institute, both in the UK. "The
results of this research allow us to predict and optimize the performance of
future fusion devices with greater confidence," said Dr. Snyder. The
collaboration experience has also enabled what he called an exciting series of
experiments on the DIII-D tokamak, including the discovery of the high
performance "Super H-Mode" regime. That is the next step in
experimentation for him on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at GA. This is the
ninth year that the IAEA has awarded an annual prize to honor exceptional work
published in Nuclear Fusion,
and IOP Publishing has contributed $2,500 towards the award. Winning papers
will be available to read be accessed online until March 2015. The 11
shortlisted papers can be read here until
December 2014. For more
information, go to: http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515 About General
Atomics Image Available: http://www2.marketwire.com/mw/frame_mw?attachid=2697175 Doug Fouquet |
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